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Whether they're about storage-unit auctions, pawn shops or people who scour the country for hidden treasures, cable's hottest shows right now all have a common theme — what Ridgewood toy(angry birds slingshot toy) and collectibles dealer Jordan Hembrough calls "found money."
Hembrough is about to become part of the genre. His "Toy Hunters" debuts tonight.
"It's 'American Pickers' meets 'Toy Story,' " says Hembrough, owner and president of Hollywood Heroes, a company he runs from his Ridgewood home. "Everyone around the country has the potential of what I like to call 'toy gold' hidden in their attic. With the advent of all these new picker shows now, everyone likes the found money, and no one's really covering toys. And the fact is … whether they had children who moved out of the house or they had them from when they were children, everyone has toys and can relate to all this stuff."
Tonight's episode — a pilot that Hembrough hopes will get high enough ratings to get picked up as a regular series — also features Stephen Savino of New Milford, Nikki Warren of Lodi and Richard Fabris of Ramsey, all of whom work with Hembrough.blue jean overalls for women
The lively, informative "Toy Hunters," produced by Sharp Entertainment in New York City ("Extreme Couponing"), has unmistakable parallels to History's "American Pickers," in which two Iowa antiquers, Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz, poke through old barns and rusting junk across America in search of potential gems.
Hembrough's travels take him to Cincinnati, Ohio, which was the home of Kenner toys; Dayton, Ohio, where a toy-magazine publisher has 400,000 toys in his warehouse; and Miami, where he visits a man who had worked for LJN, which in the 1980s made a popular "ThunderCats" toy line.
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